Critics reviews

Back in Marseille, gun in hand, his pulse is visible in the vein of his bicep as the house beat of Corona’s ‘Rhythm of the Night’ (1993) fades in on the soundtrack. Superlative pronouncements about the history of cinema are fatuous, but I’ll risk one nonetheless: what follows these desolate shots of Galoup, supine and suicidal, is perhaps the best ending of any film, ever.

Its overwhelming mood is one not of overheated desire but of regret and loneliness, the sadness of someone who seems like an exile wherever he goes.

The use of Britten on the soundtrack cuts deeper than just its ties to Melville. Britten was a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was a crime in the UK, and his opera implies a homoerotic strain to Claggart's attempts to destroy Budd. Denis, that great modern master of the sensual, runs with that homoeroticism, exulting in the voluptuous physicality of her often-half-naked male subjects, whether standing still or in rigorous motion.

At the center of this tightly wound fever dream is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), whose own unflappable façade begins to crack upon the arrival of a new legionnaire, whose inherent beauty and goodness marks him as an object of obsession. It's here that the film's stifling (yet eloquent) discipline begins to clash with deeply repressed desire, and Galoup sets events in motion that will that will bring about his own undoing.

It's one of my favorite films and a clear masterpiece, so it was odd to feel somewhat let down upon revisiting it nearly a decade on... Beau travail, a breakthrough in its day, now seems almost a transitional work when placed alongside L'Intrus, one of the great experiments in probing the surface tension of narrative in recent years, a film that throws chronology and geography into the same blender in which Denis had already been pulverizing space and narrative information.

Beau travail's emotional core may be difficult to decipher from its cold art-cinema veneer, but few films in recent memory have so poetically dramatized the poignancy of the male body... Perhaps the film's central achievement as a work of adaptation is how it complicates the Manichean worldview behind Melville's opposition of pure Billy Budd and evil Claggart.

This is not a film about narrative, but about image, sound and rhythm, the way in which they create understanding beyond storytelling. Dread, desire, peace, pain, confusion and antipathy are all present in the film. Often it is hard to place exactly why such feelings engulf the viewer as a result of what they see and hear, but the feelings are disarming nevertheless.

As permeable as the movie now feels, it also feels formidably Other. The glints of Djiboutian society, the dancelike workouts, the gnarled weight of Galoup's frown, the uncanny nighttime testament of the foundling, the unreadable finales betwixt life and death: there is so much in Beau travail that feels shaped by persons or forces uninvested in being readable, even as they solicit your partial perspectives, your tentative connections among shadowy and sun-blasted dots.

Though the vague, inscrutable tension between Lavant and Colin is fascinating, Denis mostly relies on moods and impressions to keep the film afloat, an enormous risk that pays off strictly based on her mastery of sight and sound. Ending with the most surprising and provocative coda since A Taste Of Cherry, Beau Travail is a major achievement in new French cinema.

Denis and cinematographer Agnes Godard elevate Sentain and Galoup's relationship to sweaty, maddeningly existential levels. When the half-naked men begin to circle each other on a desolate beach, they come to resemble animals locked in a battle for survival and Beau Travail takes on the guise of experimental dance art (see the film's rhythmic workout sequence and final club scene).

What makes Beau Travail so special - and confounding - is that after all these clotted demonstrations of control, Galoup does find release. Early on, he tells himself there's "freedom in remorse". It seems like just another sonorous try-out for genuine feeling, but towards the end we suddenly discover a new side to Galoup. He's in a disco, 'The Rhythm of the Night' is playing and suddenly all the elements we've seen up to now - caged beast, clockwork toy, villain - blaze manically into life.

Denis makes seeing primal and mysterious. Suddenly we are watching ourselves watch cinematographer Agnés Godard watch Denis watch men who in turn watch each other... Denis provides a coda of intensely rendered ecstatic unknowingness, capturing the power in Lavant's elegantly off starts and stops.